With the recent Netflix pricing debacle still fresh on consumers minds, it seems like a bad time to announce a price increase on a competing movie rental service. Redbox seems to be saying “Damn the torpedoes!” as this week it announced a 20 percent price increase for daily DVD rentals.

Of course this only adds $.20 to a rental, so it’s not as drastic an increase as Netflix introduced. The reason for the increase has been put down to the cost of doing business rising and in particular debit card fees increasing. As for how it decided on $.20, Redbox said it did extensive consumer research to make sure it was keeping pricing as low as possible while still offsetting costs.

Will consumers care about this price hike? Most likely not. There may be one or two grumbles from parents who are checking out movies for their kids on a Friday night, but not much more than that. The reason being that Redbox has an entirely different method of delivering content to their customers than Netflix does. The genius of the service is that it is a “value-add” in consumers’ minds.

Redbox can be put in the same bracket as buying a bottle of soda at a convenience store when getting gas. How many times have you heard yourself saying the line, “Hey we might as well get a movie tonight while we are at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart.” That is why Redbox is so successful, and why this price hike will be a small blip on people’s radars.

The price increase was announced to Redbox customers via an email, directing them to a webpage to get the full skinny on the whole deal. The details are as follows;

$.20 will be added to the cost of each daily rental. So instead of $1 consumers will pay $1.20

Blu-ray and game titles will remain at their current pricing, $1.50 and $2.00 a day respectively

Customers can still get the old pricing if they reserve online until 11/30/11, after which it goes to the new rate.

Considering this increase went into effect October 27th without an “Occupy Redbox” movement starting, we don’t expect any further upset to occur.